– “Not if they had a vaccine ready already”
But to really know that a vaccine is safe and effective its effects need to be seen in thousands of people. The more people, the better the test. Some adverse reaction only occur in 1 in 10,000 or 100,000 people. And to know if it works, those people have to be exposed to the infection. So unless there are labs somewhere with at least a million test subjects held prisoner, and perfectly secure to viral escape even through the prison guards, properly understanding the vaccine would require release of the virus.
When it comes to testing medicine, the elite are in the same boat as everyone else, because we’re all human.